Volume 5, Number 6 · October 28, 1965
Passionate Pilgrimage
By John Gross
The Mandelbaum Gate
by Muriel Spark
Knopf, 369 pp., $5.95
Muriel Spark began as a novelist by staking out a distinctive territory of her own, a cranky half-world of solitaries and charlatans, occult dabblings and senile decay. Cranky, or worse: on the outskirts, obscenity nudges and madness beckons. Taken with a straight face, the early fiction would be appalling. But as it is, the light of comedy shines firm and clear over all Mrs. Spark's work. She is no more disconcerting than she intends to be, a connoisseur of oddities and aberrations whose art is never infected by the morbidity of her subject-matter. Every move is neatly calculated, every device exquisitely shaped; she is detached enough from her creations for her to be able to make frequent jokes at the expense of fictional artifice itself, in the tradition of Tristram Shandy. At the same time she is far more observant than the average naturalistic chronicler, with a keen eye for mundane domestic detail, and a wonderful talent for mimicry. C. P. Snow (as he then was) once described her as a writer with one foot off the ground; but the other foot doesn't, so to speak, budge. Of course, the macabre is all the more effective for peeping out from behind the commonplace; but latterly, in any case, it has pretty well disappeared. Certainly the cloven hooves, disembodied voices and other supernatural props have been dispensed with.
Review, 2414 words
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